Chuck Close

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to wor...”

“Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

“A face is a road map of someone's life. Without any need to amplify that or draw attention to it, there's a great deal that's communicated about who this person is and what their life experi...”

“I don't care about the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim isn't involved in anything that I am interested in. I don't care about motorcycles and Armani suits.”

“You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very...”

“Of all the artists who emerged in the '80s, I think perhaps Cindy Sherman is the most important.”

“Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that's embedded in the work.”

“I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.”

“There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.”

“All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.”

“I'm plagued with indecision in my life. I can't figure out what to order in a restaurant.”

“There are so many artists that are dyslexic or learning disabled, it's just phenomenal. There's also an unbelievably high proportion of artists who are left-handed, and a high correlation be...”

“It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.”

“In the 7th grade, I made a 20-foot long mural of the Lewis and Clark Trail while we were studying that in history because I knew I wasn't going to be able to spit back the names and the date...”

“Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.”

“Women in general interest me. I like how women are more liable to talk about real things, personal things.”

“In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.”

“A photograph doesn't gain weight or lose weight, or change from being happy to being sad. It's frozen. You can use it, then recycle it.”

“You don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today you will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere.”

“The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.”